


After Hours:  Why Dan's Brain Needs to Shut Up and Enjoy the Damn Moment Already!

by thinlizzy2



Category: Cracked - Ambiguous Fandom, Cracked: After Hours
Genre: Comfort Food, M/M, Morning After, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 14:38:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7176017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinlizzy2/pseuds/thinlizzy2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan wakes up with Soren in his bed and has a typically Dan-ish reaction.  Things build from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Hours:  Why Dan's Brain Needs to Shut Up and Enjoy the Damn Moment Already!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [effpeeks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/effpeeks/gifts).



Daniel O'Brien stands up on shaky legs and makes his way towards the bedroom door. Because he is him, and the universe likes to screw him over as much as possible, he stubs his toe quite painfully on his way out. Though it's extremely tempting to scream an entire Tarantino's worth of swear words at his throbbing digit, Dan manages to instead bite his tongue long enough to escape the room in silence. 

He absolutely cannot make any noise. Soren Bowie is sleeping in his bed, and Dan needs to _think_ about this. 

He's still not sure what happened last night. Not that he'd been drinking, though he wishes now that he had. He'd said some pretty embarrassing things in the heat of the moment; it would have been really nice to have been able to blame at least some of his flowery prose on alcohol. But he hadn't touched a drop. He'd just been... he doesn't know. Smitten, maybe. Lust-drunk. Discombobulated by a cocky smile and great cheekbones and a pair of sea-blue eyes that cannot possibly be as deep as Dan can't help believing they are. By what amounts to fucking _years_ of longing. So essentially, last night he was in his default 'Soren is around' setting. Yeah, there are no great mysteries about his own motivations. 

He just doesn’t know why _Soren_ is here. 

He's been trying to figure it out from that moment at the party when, bizarrely, his entire belief system had been twisted beyond recognition. He'd been ducking eye contact all night, ever since Mike had teased him in the car. 

"Dude, be more obvious! Try tattooing 'Down for the trip to Bone Town' on your forehead or something. It's pitiful, I swear." And Dan hadn't been able to believe that even Michael Swaim would be careless enough to wreck his life with just three sentences. 

Luckily, Soren had already been halfway up the driveway at that point, six pack of weird wheat beers in hand, greeting the various hot people he knew from outside of work. Dan had just sat there and watched him go, painfully aware of the enormous scope of Soren's life outside of the eight hours a day they spend in the office together from Monday to Friday, until Mike's comment had propelled him out of the car. 

Dan hates parties. He especially hates loud parties full of loud people that he doesn't know but already hates. If anyone but Soren had invited him to that kind of party, he would have left after five minutes. Actually, if anyone but Soren had invited him he wouldn't have even gone, and he wished so much right then that he hadn't. Even the possibility of a few extra minutes in Soren's company wasn't worth the nightmare images unfolding in front of him. 

Soren surrounded by so many gorgeous women that he'd appeared to be starring in the opening scene of some painfully by the numbers porn flick. Soren laughing loudly and obnoxiously at jokes about sports and acrobatic sex acts and other things that Dan couldn't understand. Soren doing shots of something neon and oily with a group of guys who, as far as Dan could tell, were uniformly named Chad. All the Chads had looked alike too, and he'd wanted to make a joke about Attack of the Chads, but Soren had been all the way across the room and there wouldn't have been any point with only Mike there to appreciate it. 

_Come over here,_ Dan had thought, desperately. _I've got something funny to say, and you'll like it. You'll laugh, a real laugh, not that gross bray you're doing for these guys, and you'll put a hand on my shoulder and look at me fondly for a second and it won't be much – it'll be nothing to you – but it'll be enough to keep me going for weeks._ Unable to help himself, he had allowed himself to stare at Soren for just a moment, helplessly feeling the look of pure longing spreading across his face. _Please come here. Be near me._

Oh shit. Was that out loud? Judging by the weird looks he was getting, it very possibly was. The look of amused delight on Mike's face upped the odds from possible to likely and the roll of his so-called friend's eyes made it a one hundred percent certainty that Dan's worst nightmare was actually happening. But before he could will himself to wake up, Mike had already pranced across the room and was whispering something to Soren. And Dan would have taken a thousand of the naked in the high school cafeteria style bad dreams turning into reality over what he now had to cope with.

The result had been so immediate that, if Dan had been thinking more clearly, he would have made a note to use that moment in a future diner discussion. 'Surefire Ways to Know You've Developed Mind Control Powers', maybe. Or possibly 'How to Know it's Unexpectedly Backwards Day Without Asking'. 

But he hadn't been thinking clearly, not when Soren had peeled away from the Chads and hustled Dan outside. Not when he'd whispered against Dan's neck, voice warm and beery and sweet, "Don't kill me if Michael's just fucking around, okay?" And not when he'd pushed Dan up against the side of the car – so hard that Dan was pretty sure he had a door-handle shaped bruise on his ass – and kissed him in a way that had honestly made a bunch of imaginary violins swell up. Certainly not when he'd kept one hand on Dan's inner thigh all the way back to the apartment, so that every single red light had felt like agony. And not when they'd finally - _finally_ \- made it into the bedroom, linked at the mouths – and Dan had been at least seven eighths of the way to a panic attack, but then Soren had sank to his knees and... 

And Dan is hard again and there is definitely no point to that. He wills himself to calm down. He needs a clear head. He needs to _think_. He needs... 

He needs chocolate milk. 

He pulls out the milk and adds the chocolate syrup directly, shaking the carton vigorously. This is his emergency cure-all for pretty much everything. When Firefly was cancelled, when X-Men 3 desecrated the Phoenix Saga, when Joffrey just fucking refused to die for three full seasons, chocolate milk was there for him. He takes a gulp from the spout. Then he frowns and takes another. 

Nope, it's not doing it. 

He swallows hard. He knows he has a thing for Soren; he's known that for a while. And he knows that he's in trouble now. But there's only ever been a handful of situations in his life that couldn't be fixed with chocolate milk, and literally none of those have ever involved a real live untelevised human. If chocolate milk isn't helping, then this is more than a crush. If chocolate milk has no effect, then the idea of having fucked things up with Soren is just as bad as Hayden Christensen's casting or the velociraptor motorcycle bros. 

This is a potentially life-ruining situation. This requires extra syrup. 

He digs his emergency supplies out from the back of the pantry and studies them carefully, willing himself to focus. He only has this one carton of milk, and he's not going to mentally survive a trip to the shop at the moment. 

He'd be way, way too worried about Soren potentially being gone by the time he got back. 

Hell, maybe Soren is awake now, lying in bed trying to figure out why the hell he slept with Daniel O'Brien last night. Maybe he's mentally drafting the words he'll need to leave Dan standing there alone in his kitchen, sad and used but still pathetically grateful, like the women in the Bond films that don't actually get to be the Bond Girls. Possibly he's even already gone, having climbed out the window, like some kind of impossibly sexy Spider-Man and only the webbing on Dan's sheets will prove that he had ever been there at all. 

Ew. He fights the urge to go change his sheets. Instead, he drags his attention back to the syrups. 

He dismisses the caramel and the strawberry right away. Too pedestrian, too average, too totally unlike Soren to offer any kind of clarity. The cherry is a possibility until he thinks _like Soren's lips_ and then he immediately hates both himself and the cherry syrup for bringing that bit of banality into the world. The French vanilla makes him think of Soren's skin and the banana – oh _God_ , the banana – makes him think of Soren's cock. And he simutaneously wants to cry, throw the bottle the bottle across the room and run back into bed and beg Soren to please, please, _please_ , just let him touch that beautiful dick one more time. 

No to the banana. 

That leaves the passion fruit. He'd bought it on a whim, which was totally unlike him, but he'd seen it in the shop and had been completely intrigued. He's never even had a fresh passion fruit; until he saw the picture on the bottle he probably wouldn't have been able to identify a passion fruit on sight. But it had looked so tempting, so unusual and exotic, that it had somehow ended up in his cart, his bag, and then his home. Dan had stashed it in the back of the pantry, not wanting to risk ruining his good-enough chocolate milk with this unknown confection, yet weirdly unwilling to just let it go and put it in the trash. 

He reaches for it now, unsettled. But then a pair of lips press against the back of his neck and he totally forgets why a bottle of flavored sugar ever had the power to make him nervous. 

"Hey, sexy." Soren's arms wrap around Dan's chest, one hand resting just above his heart. Dan is certain Soren must be able to feel its frightened jackrabbit beats, but he's not extracting himself from this embrace until he has absolutely no choice. "Making breakfast?" And Dan just nods because making breakfast sounds much saner than having chocolate milk therapy.

Soren laughs, suddenly, and lets go of Dan to pick up the bottle of strawberry syrup. Dan has never imagined being jealous of syrup before, but here he is. Soren gestures at all the options. "Is this seriously what you eat every morning?" 

"What do you normally have?" Dan asks, trying to sound casual. 

Trying not to let on that he's thinking _STAY. Just stay. I will make literally anything you want for breakfast. I will hunt down wild game and make you a black rhino omelet if you want it. Just stay_. 

"Bacon," Soren says. He squirts a bit of French vanilla syrup onto his tongue and French vanilla immediately becomes Dan's new favorite. "Eggs. You know – protein." He shoots Dan a dazzing white grin. And considering the circumstances, it is extremely possible that for once Dan isn't just imagining that that's a come-on. 

He knows he should say something in response. Something suave and vaguely sexual, a continuation of the verbal dance that will lead them back to the bedroom to get all rutty and squishy and sinned up again. His brain casts about desperately, trying to find the right line, and finally coming up with: 

" _WHY???_ " 

Soren blinks. "Well, you know, for energy. And stuff." 

"No." Dan rubs his eyes and took a slug of inadequate chocolate milk. "Why are you here? Why did you come home with me last night?" He points at the bedroom. "Why did... _that_ happen?" 

Soren's face falls a bit. "Are you saying you didn't want-" 

"I wanted!" There's no point in denying it now. If nothing else, the high-pitched dolphin squeaks he'd been making last night gave him away hours ago. "I wanted, and I've been wanting, and I want! But I want lots of things. I want an Indiana Jones prequel that doesn't suck and a DS9 reboot and a viable fantasy vehicle for Christina Ricci and I wanted to know what your skin tastes like and I don't get why I got one of those things and not the others." Luckily he needs to stop and catch his breath, otherwise there's no telling what other embarrassingly nerdy things could come spewing out of his mouth. 

Soren cocks his head to the side. "Casting a young Indy is almost an impossible task, right now the alternate original series is getting all the Star Trek funding and Christina Ricci hasn't been bankable enough to build a franchise around for something like 15 years. And I'd been waiting for a sign that you might be into me for so long that when Mike told me I finally had the green light I just had to act." 

"You really put that kind of faith in Michael Swaim?" The very idea is terrifying.

"Well..." Soren's cheeks turn pink and it is all way too adorable. "I also saw how you were looking at me. Come on, was I seriously supposed to resist that?" 

"The way I looked at you?" 

"That's right." 

"Soren... I look at you like that _all the time_." 

Soren laughs again and it's just such a beautiful sound. "That what Michael's been saying. But I've always made a point of sitting next to you whenever we go to the diner. You know, to be close." Is Soren Bowie actually _blushing_? He is, and it's so cute that Dan's heart turns over a little bit. "And, I guess, so you wouldn't notice how _I_ look at _you_. I never really believed it until last night." 

"You never believed I could be interested in you?" Dan has clearly been transported to Bizarro World and somehow didn't notice until now. 

"Sure." Soren shrugs. "You're so smart, Dan. You're always ten steps ahead of me; you've won every argument before I even know what side I'm on. I don't know anyone whose brain works like yours. And you always seem so above all of it – the sex, the dating, the romance. I never thought you'd be into me, even though I've been telling everyone - well, Katie and Michael anyway - that if you just gave me the slightest little sign I'd go for it in a second. But Mike said-" 

"Be more obvious." Dan interrupts him. 

"What?" 

"Michael told me to be more obvious about how I feel about you." 

Soren smiles and leans forward. "He's a better friend than any of us give him credit for." 

And then he kisses Dan, a deep and head-swimming kiss that has Dan clutching at him, open-mouthed and feverish, fighting the urge to sigh and swoon and do other ridiculous things. Instead, he reaches down to grab Soren's glorious ass with both hands. While his brain is busy being shocked at his own daring, his hips thrust forward of their own accord, grinding his hardening cock against Soren's. 

The kiss goes on for another minute or so until Soren pulls away. Somehow Dan knows this isn't a rejection, even after Soren wriggles out of his arms and returns to the syrups. Grinning, he grabs hold of the chocolate and, after a moment of contemplation, the passion fruit. "Are these any good together?" 

"I'm not sure," Dan has to admit. "I think they would be. But I've never really given them a try." 

Soren kisses him again, lightly and playfully. "Let's find out." And then Soren and the syrups head back towards the bedroom, and Dan is only too happy to follow them

**Author's Note:**

> Effpecks, thank you so much for requesting this. It was so much fun to write; I enjoyed it a great deal. I hope you like the results!


End file.
